Happy Monday... is the first thing I have written in my notes because class started off with an impromptu presentation from Mick because he has his final paper worked out, writing his own Four Quartets using Northrop Frye. (is anyone else feeling a bit anxious now?)
so we should all be thinking about our final papers, past themes & material from other classes, we are to bring it together into our own swan song, this is our capstone...
HOMEWORK!! - Blog about Walter Pater! Must. He is essential to theories of epiphany. Hopkins was a student of Pater (the link is on my previous blog post of class notes)
Hopkins "inscape"
Wordsworth - emotion recollected in tranquility
Dillard - eclipse
Proust - revelation from dunking his cookie
continually responsive to the presence of the word or world? (can't read my notes) Frye: metaphorical habit
Adam is possessed, just everyone knows and he is writing a poem
Back to filling in the gaps of the presentations from Dr. Sexson
speak about the dark epiphany
no longer speaking of the benign epiphany
Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot
"Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after."
These above lines are devastating, dark........
infected by unconscious distracted people...similar image to wasteland......Dante
consumes itself
Kafka, distraction is only evil in the world
TV distracts us from distraction by distraction.
Which is a coincidence, or maybe not that we talked about this because the night
before class Monday morning, I slept about 2 or 3 hours. I was kept from sleep
because I was paranoid that there was a vagrant living in a condo across from
our house, and I was worried that he know that I knew and he was going to break
into the house. It didn't help that the cold causes the house to make strange
noises. So in order to distract myself from this (paranoid) distraction, I turned
on the TV. It worked distracting me from my other distraction that was probably
far more interesting, but a distraction I could not cope with, all the while
this all distracted me from sleep.
Need to spend our time with the negative, awesome, awful.
KENOSIS emptying out
How Eliot feels about words:
"Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. "
BLOG HOMEWORK St. John of the Cross, the Dark Night of the Soul, a detailed set of instructions for a soul to redeem itself.
references metaphor, climbing down the ladder, negative epiphanies
before climbing up the ladder you must go down
(you gotta get up so you get down, or rather down before up.)
Joseph Campbell
East Coker has a lot of dark epiphanies, section III of E.C. is the great dark epiphany
Starts in part II "What is the late November doing..."
"In the middle, not only the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment."
East Coker part reminds us of Dante
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly."
*no wisdom derived from experience
mystical, Kabbala
"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God."
-not a usual view of God, also brings to mind Harold Bloom
you need the furnace, you need to get burned, to be purified....(like purgatory?)
Paradoxes, giving up of things:
"You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only think you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."
Beckett, when the characters give up their possessions, demonstration of kenosis, giving up of things
Taylor, contents of her purse....everything ordinary.....but a dagger?! Happy Days film.....the woman keeps a revolver
The Jerk, an attachment to all his stuff
Dry Salvages
"Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?"
Recognize there is a problem, (like addiction), human condition, distraction, need to make a digression in order to make the mysterious mental maneuver
Dry Salvages
"When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,"
not even the same person as we were a second ago, continually in the process of change
Bhagavad Gita
Buddhism, 4 Nobel Truths, #1 all life is suffering and ephemeral
Little Gidding
"gifts reserved for age...cold friction...impotence of rage"
"unless restored by that refining fire"
After the Furnace, purified.....(purgatory, for purging)
"like a dancer"
join the dance, Alice and Wonderland, will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Little Gidding IV
"The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire."
Human beings...........to become conscious
arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
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